This week the world’s longest-running nuclear power station ran out of steam. At 11am on Wednesday, the appropriately named Oldbury in Gloucestershire – once a location for a Doctor Who storyline – was switched off after 44 years, as part of a wider shutdown that will cut Britain’s 10 atomic plants to just one in little more than a decade.

That same morning, just down the Severn Estuary, protesters were evicted from a deserted farmhouse on the site of the first of the new reactors designed to replace them. But the original start-up date for the plant – to be built by the French firm EDF at Somerset’s Hinkley Point – has already slipped by two years, from 2017 to 2019, and this week it emerged that the Office for Nuclear Regulation is delaying its safety approval.

It’s an ominous picture as next weekend’s anniversary of the Japanese tsunami and the disaster at Fukushima approaches – yet Britain is supposed to be one of the world’s few nuclear bright spots. Having been reassured that no one has died from radiation at the plant (compared to the 16,000 killed by the tidal wave), Britons are registering their highest ever approval levels of the technology. The Government wants to wring 30 per cent of our power from the atom by 2030 – almost double the current proportion.

Elsewhere, the “nuclear renaissance” before Fukushima – which saw more than 400 reactors in construction or in the pipeline – has gone into reverse. Germany plans to scrap all its reactors by 2022. Italy, whose senate voted by 154-1 in 2009 to end a 22-year ban on new plants, has turned its back on the atom again. So has Switzerland, not known for its vulnerability to tsunamis. Belgium is considering phasing out the atom as early as 2015. Spain and Luxembourg are similarly hostile. And this week, Kuwait abandoned its programme to build four reactors to eke out its oil supplies.

The most dramatic reaction has come in France, which relies on nuclear power for almost 80 per cent of its electricity – something that has had strong public support. Yet last June, more than three quarters of respondents told an opinion poll that they wanted it phased out. François Hollande, the Socialist candidate who is favourite to win the presidential election, promises to close 24 of the country’s 58 reactors by 2025.

Understandably, Japan too is now in crisis, with just two of its 54 reactors in operation. Its government is drawing up new energy plans, but the cities of Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe have already urged their main electricity supplier to cease its reliance on nuclear power.

The report of the first independent, authoritative inquiry into Fukushima – published this week in Japanese – will only increase concern. It shows that a true catastrophe was averted not through the inherent safety of the technology, as nuclear advocates have been claiming, but through good fortune and the heroism of workers on the site.

“It was extreme luck that Japan managed to avoid experiencing the most disastrous day,” reported Koichi Kitazawa, a former head of the country’s Science and Technology Agency and a prominent member of the inquiry. It showed that there could have been a “devil’s chain reaction” of nuclear explosions. If that had happened, said Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, Tokyo would have been “finished”.

Even without such alarming news, it seems that the nuclear flame is flickering in places where it once burnt brightly. The United States has just authorised its first two reactors in 30 years, but only in Georgia, where the electricity price is favourably regulated. China and India remain the industry’s greatest hopes, but their programmes are slowing in the face of public protests: China began work on 10 new reactors in 2010, but none last year.

There is also little chance that the Coalition’s ambitions will be realised in Britain. The predecessors of EDF’s planned reactor, in Finland and France, are years behind schedule and vastly over budget. The other likely builder, Horizon, appears far from a final decision to invest. As more and more ageing reactors like Oldbury come offline over the next few years, the amount of power we get from the atom is set to dwindle rather than grow.

Bhutan’s 'Noah’s Ark’ does its bit to save the snow leopard

Good news – research in a newish national park in the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has found it to be a modern “Noah’s Ark” for wildlife, helping to save the endangered snow leopard as global warming takes hold.

The Wangchuck Centennial park – set up in 2008 to celebrate the ruling dynasty’s 100 years on the throne – hosts an “incredible richness of wildlife”, according to the country’s minister of agriculture and forests, with 23 species of mammal (including Tibetan wolf, blue sheep, Himalayan serow, musk deer and wild dog) and 134 types of bird. But it is the abundance of snow leopards – of which less than 7,500 remain in the wild – that has caused the most excitement.

The animals are being squeezed by climate change. As temperatures rise, treelines are creeping up the mountains, shrinking habitats and forcing the leopards ever higher. As they climb, they are bumping into limits imposed by the scarcity of the oxygen they need to breathe.

The reserve connects with other national parks, allowing the leopards to move more freely. Such parks now cover half of the kingdom, adding to its reputation as one of the most conservation-minded countries in the world.

Times won’t be a-changing for university’s calendar boys

Enjoy Leap Day? I hope so. If the designers of a new calendar have their way, it could be the last of its kind.

Profs Steve Hanke and Richard Cohn Henry, at Maryland’s John Hopkins University, have come up with what they self-effacingly entitle the “Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar”. If adopted, it would put them up there with Julius Caesar, who introduced the Julian calendar in 46 BC, and Pope Gregory XIII, who twiddled it in 1582, by which point it had fallen 11 days behind.

Hanke and Henry want a 364-day year of eight 31-day, and four 30-day, months. February leap days would go, in favour of adding a “leap week” at the end of December every five or six years. Every date would always fall on the same day of the week, enabling, says Henry, “permanent, rational planning of annual events”.

Hmm. Christmas and New Year’s Day would always fall on Sundays, and the 4.8 million people with birthdays on February 29 would finally celebrate them every year. But those born on the 31st of January, May, July or August would never have one again.

Unfortunately for the academics’ ambitions, there’s now no all-powerful pope or dictator to decree that the times are changing. Perhaps their nearest equivalent – if they could get him to change Microsoft’s settings – would be Bill Gates.